Jesse Metcalfe Was Turned Away From Vampire Diaries After Being Told His Face Was ‘Too Nice’ to Play a Vampire

Jesse Metcalfe could have played a vampire — if he wasn’t so nice-looking.

Metcalfe, 46, appeared on the July 16 episode of Tori Spelling’s misSPELLING podcast. During the episode, Spelling, 62, called the Desperate Housewives alum a “good guy” and joked that he should have been cast as Jacob the werewolf in the Twilight movies. 

That reminded Metcalfe of the time he tried to get cast as a vampire. He revealed that he auditioned for The Vampire Diaries (which ultimately ran on the CW from 2009 to 2017). “’I’ll never forget, a really high-up executive at CW was like, ‘You could never play a vampire because you have too nice of a face.’ That’s what she said to me. She said, ‘You look like too nice of a guy to play a vampire.’ ” 

“I’m not really that nice,” Metcalfe joked with Spelling. “I got a lot of edge.”

Metcalfe and Spelling also reflected on how they balance what they share on social media, and Metcalfe said his girlfriend, Helene Immel, helps him with his. But, the John Tucker Must Die star said, it “wasn’t easy” to adapt to sharing his life online. “We were told for so many years that we had to maintain our mystique. You didn’t want to put too much out there,” he said. “You didn’t want to give people too much. You didn’t want to share too much about your personal life. And now it’s like share everything.”

Spelling said she’s found she’s “polarizing” for people, and Metcalfe said he could relate. “Throughout my life, people have either loved me or hated me,” the Nutrl Skin founder explained. “I got a lot of criticism growing up for the way I looked. A lot of hate. And I think that resurfaced again once I got into Hollywood and broke as an actor.”

He said it was “tough” with the paparazzi and the expansion of the Internet in the 2000s. “It was pretty brutal,” he said. “I dealt with a lot of scrutiny, a lot of criticism. Just picking apart my appearance.” Metcalfe said nowadays, people don’t realize “how hard the industry was in the Y2K era.” 

The actor also said, “I’ve had a lot of people say that I’m difficult to work with… And honestly, I feel like a lot of people that maybe just didn’t like me tried to hurt my career, you know? Or smear me. Or character assassinate me.”

As for why someone might have called him difficult to work with, he said, “People really want actors to be seen and kind of not heard. I mean, they want you to come prepared, be on time, hit your mark, do your job. They don’t really want to hear your opinion. That’s really the problem.”

In a 2021 interview, Metcalfe said that being a “sex symbol” on Desperate Housewives — where he played teen gardener John Rowland — led to his appearance being “criticized and picked apart by a lot of people in the media.” 

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“Having your shirt off in every episode of Housewives brought a lot of pressure,” he said. “You have to stay in the best shape you can, and then between projects, everyone expects you to stay in that shape 24/7, 365. That’s not realistic. That’s why paparazzi catch actors between projects looking ‘out of shape’ — they’re taking time off and that includes the gym.” In 2024, he said he was “working out three times a day” while filming John Tucker Must Die to stay in shape.